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I feel like reading any "message" into this is kind of missing the point. It's a marketing venture by a corporation hoping to get more business in Latin America. Maybe the fact that this half-time show exists is emblematic of something, but it's not like the small number of people who ultimately made the decision that this was the show they were going with were thinking about anything besides market growth.
I find the simultaneous "wow, this brave show sends a really necessary message to the evil Trump administration!" and "message? what message? You're imaging things" on the left fascinating, but it gets pretty tiring at this point. Marketing is extremely woke overall, PMCs overall are disproportionally as well, and the small number of people who made the decision are either likely so rich and/or far removed from any potential consequences that they can easily afford to send any message they like under the thinnest of veneers. This idea that anyone working in a corporation is automatically a dispassionate stock-maxxing robot really needs to die. They are humans, and humans are tribal and emotional. Plenty have paid much more for much less.
Why do people on this forum impute that I automatically hold other left-leaning positions when I express some unrelated left-leaning opinion? I have not said the first of those statements.
I don't claim that you, personally, hold those views. I'm noting that the left overall does, and that this is a frequent tension where some part, especially media people, openly admit to doing messaging that way and considering it and unalloyed good, while another part pretends this is beyond the pale, nobody would do this. Just yesterday I read multiple articles from big media corps which considered it obvious that a message was send, and that the show was important precisely because it does so.
When exactly the people who make these kinds of decisions consider it obvious, how much sense does make to deny it? Yet, it's a common refrain, especially among the moderate left. The same goes, for example, for kids movies, where some of the writers can be found on bluesky publicly talking about how stories can be used to educate kids, and explain very well what they mean with educating, but when you critisize this there will always be some people jumping in, claiming that the entire idea is stupid, nobody would ever do this.
After some more thought I think my initial statement was too strong, surely the political views of employees do seep into these kinds of outputs to some extent.
I still think that this show was pretty clearly aimed at hispanic people, especially those in Latin America. As an anglo America any message in it is kind of besides the point as you are not the target audience.
Sorry if my post was overly abrasive, in any case. There's lots of discussion to be had about how many sub-messages are in each piece of media and their respective share of importance. There are always multiple messages being sent simultaneously, some of them even unintentionally. I just find the hard denial of political messaging quite frustrating at this point.
But even with that in mind, I can't help but think that turning the halftime show of the super bowl - to my knowledge one of the biggest public events in the US - into something where the majority of the US population is literally not the target audience is itself a message, and not a very nice one.
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